18 Dec Long term travel insurance 2018 update

Finding backpackers insurance has been the most difficult travel planning task so far. I left Andrew the task of researching and buying our long term travel insurance while he was on autumn school holidays and I was at work. He found a great deal, a £253 year-long policy! That’s one more task crossed off the list, or so I thought…

2018 travel insurance update

Since writing this initial article in 2013, we’ve used a number of long term travel insurance providers including Globelink, Explorer, Admiral and OUL Direct. If you’re looking for Globelink International reviews, we used the company for 15 months and had no problems with them, the customer service was very good and the price fair (£576 for two people). Luckily, we never had to make a claim so we can’t comment on the process.

We also bought additional travel insurance from World Nomads when trekking to Everest Base Camp. This cost £175 for two people for 15 days of hiking at altitude. Fortunately, we’ve never had to claim on our travel insurance yet, but we still make sure to check the small print carefully. Check out how we select travel insurance below.

Our currently policy for travelling in South America for 230 days is from Explorer Travel Insurance. It gives us £5 million medical cover including repatriation costs, £750 baggage cover, £125 passport cover and £1m personal liability cover. The total cost is £190 for two people. We also still use Photoguard for extra cover for our electronics, this now costs about £80 per year. In addition, we have a £10 per month insurance policy with PC World to cover Amy’s Macbook too.

We got extra insurance for trekking in Nepal

Always read the small print

Flash back to 2013: It was only when I sat down to write this post that I actually started reading the small print of our contract. It said: ‘This policy is not valid for one way trips’. Considering that we don’t have return tickets to the UK, that means ours wouldn’t be covered. To make matters worse, by the time I discovered this it was already long past the cooling-off period during which we could get a full refund, so we stood to lose £253 of our hard-earned travel savings. Fortunately, after much scolding from me about not bothering to read the small print, Andrew managed to get a hold of the company. After some begging, he miraculously wrangled a full refund. Lucky for him is all I can say.

What to look for in the best long term travel insurance

So, back to square one and hours of searching online, comparing policies, calling companies and slowly loosing our minds. Here’s the thing about backpacking travel insurance:

Most policies don’t allow you to make claims when you’re actually travelling, you have to wait until you return home to do that.

Even so called long term travel insurance policies require that you have a return ticket home booked, or you at least need to be able to prove that you intend to return to your home country (with a letter of employment, for example).

Most policies don’t cover many of your valuables. Typically, insurance policies offer around £1,500 baggage cover, with a single item value limit of around £150 and a total valuable limit of around £200.

So, what’s the best backpacker travel insurance for us?

In the end we only found two companies which would allow us to make claims while abroad and to travel without intending to return home at the end of the policy. Here are the details based on 12 months’ cover:

World Nomads

Globelink International

Countries covered

Worldwide

Worldwide

Medical cover (excess)

£3,000,000 (£100)

£5,000,000 (£40)

Baggage cover (excess)

£1,250 (£75)

£1,000 (£40)

Single item limit

£100

£150

Valuables limit

£400

£150

Policy cost per person

£462.39

Policy cost for a couple

£923

£441

*Figures are sourced from the respective companies

Although we’ve heard rave reviews about World Nomads, which is the only real nomad travel insurance company out there, we decided not to go with them. While we don’t expect to get extremely cheap backpacker travel insurance, we think that they’re just too expensive, especially considering their policy wouldn’t even cover our electronics.

Globelink International Travel Insurance, on the other hand, isn’t as well known but costs less than half the price of World Nomads. In fact, the Globelink excess is also much cheaper and they actually offer more medical cover. The only problem we can foresee is that they can only cover us for a total time period of 18 months. After that we’ll be classed as permanent travellers and will need private travel insurance. World Nomads, in comparison, allow you to continue extending your policy.

In the end, we chose to go for 15 months’ cover (the most you can get online) with Globelink. We’ll extend this to 18 when we’re on the road. So, the total cost of our travel insurance, for two people for 15 months is £576.

* We’ve been told that Globelink no longer allow one-way trips on their policies, so maybe World Nomads is the way to go now.

Pin Me For Later!

Travel insurance for our electronics

All sorted now? Not quite. We still needed additional insurance to cover our travel laptop, camera, phones and Kindles while we’re travelling. We took out additional gadget insurance to cover our electronics for 12 months with PhotoGuard, this cost us £48.

*The information in this article is based on our own personal research. Please do your own before you take out any travel insurance. Please also bear in mind that we are from England, therefore we don’t have private medical insurance because we’re covered by the National Health Service. Let us know in the comments below what long term travel insurance you use.

32 Comments

Thanks for posting this, lots of good info. I’m tucking it away for future extended travel plans. For our trip to Paris we just purchased trip insurance, that will cover us while in Paris. But, it’s just for this one trip so will definitely need more for later travels.

Amy

Hi Patti, longer term travel insurance is really tricky to find and expensive to buy – I’m glad that I can check this task off my travel planning list; just have to find the gadget insurance now *sigh*.

Amy

Hi Shane, Globelink are pretty cheap and helpful. Actually yesterday we got another insurance recommendation from the guys at Never Ending Voyage – they use a company called True Traveller Insurance. They seem like another pretty good option – I’ll have to update this article to reflect that.

Ugh, searching for LT travel insurance is the absolute worst, especially because it’s the thing you hope you’ll pay for and then never have to use! It was doubly bad for us as Tony & I have different citizenship, which meant we had to do double the research. In the end, we also opted to forego World Nomads, because although they are the popular, well-publicized choice, we too found they were far pricier than other companies we dug up with a little digging. Sounds like you guys are definitely on the right track (though we never could find a decent policy to cover our electronics, etc.,) & I am glad to read that you are getting insurance rather than just crossing your fingers and hoping nothing bad happens!

Amy

Hi Steph, I’m far too paranoid to go away without insurance and far too stingy to pay World Nomads steep prices! We are still really struggling to find electronics cover too; are just relying on cover from your main insurance policies then?

Our electronics are the one thing we just don’t have any coverage for, save for whatever minimal (and insufficient) policies we had! We couldn’t find anything that would cover theft/loss in any substantial way, so we have just had to be vigilant about our belongings and that has been working out. It’s not ideal, but we couldn’t find any better solution.

[…] Amy’s research into visas, vaccinations and debit cards have all been passed off to Deirdre as my own. The accumulated brownie points were only lost in my complete failure so far to obtain any travel insurance. […]

Gem

Thanks for a great review of things. I was worried about my IPad and found with True Traveller I could add it on and get it insured for up to £450! Awesome! Couldn’t find this anywhere else, so thanks for posting this!

[…] of onward travel, which means booking flights in advance. However, we were lucky when it came to travel vaccinations as we got most of these for free on the NHS; we’ve also opted to buy our malaria pills and get […]

Amazing, I’ve been doing rounds of Internet for months trying to find something with this exact problem! Why is it so hard to find, it’s not exactly unprecedented that people will want to travel long term with their gadgets…or am I missing something? Going to look up how much to cover camera with photo guard now, hopefully ipad, kindle, iPod will be covered by other stuff. Even more, hopefully I don’t need to use it. Photo guard only does cameras, right?

Andrew

Glad you’ve found it useful Steph! I think there is some small print in the photo guard contract that says that you laptop must be used in some way to store/edit/upload the photos you take. Best check the small print first. It may include iPhones and iPads if you’re using them for lots of pictures. The staff were helpful when we called with any questions. We haven’t had to think about our insurance so far, let’s hope we don’t have to at all!

Rita

great post here guys! im leaving travelling in a few weeks and still struggling with finding a decent gardet insurer (for my camera, laptop, kindle and phone). just a quick question about electronics insurance. does photoguard cover laptops, phones, cameras and kindles? isn’t it just cameras? also it seems that minimum cost for a year if travelling worldwide is £86 and if just UK its £48. your advice would be appreciated.

Andrew

We only use Photoguard for our camera and laptop, you can insure your laptop with their policies if it is used for storing, editing or doing anything else to your photos. It mentions it in their FAQ’s. Our equipment value is £620 (camera and laptop) and they quoted us at the time £48 including worldwide cover. The policy wording is quite specific so have a good read through before you buy anything. Our travel insurance had/has the option of adding individual items onto the insurance, perhaps that could cover your phone and kindle? Again, it’s always best to read the terms and conditions before you buy anything, you may spot something that we missed!

Thanks for the advice guys. We are trying to get this sorted now (and need to to get our Russian Visa).

The best we could find was Insure and Go who for around £400 offer no excess, cover trekking over Everest heights (5.5m), scuba to 50m and have cover for valuables (phone, laptop and camera) – up to £2k overall claim, £1k per item.

Cheaper ones like Alpha Insurance and the Globelink don’t have the Valuables (phone, camera, laptop) cover. Finding a gadget add who will cover long periods of time abroad is hard! Our only problem with Photoguard is they do not cover phones!

Did you play around with Insure and Go out of interest as we’re still getting my head around the fine print?

Amy

Hi guys, I know shopping for long-term travel insurance is such a pain! We have used Insure and Go for a short trip to Kenya a few years ago but we didn’t consider them for long-term insurance for some reason; it sounds like a good policy though. Do you have an open-ended travel ticket? If so, did you check whether Insure and Go require you to have a return ticket to make a claim? This was the main problem with many of the policies we checked out. Since our phones are old and we only use them for music we didn’t bother covering them; all our other gadgets were covered through a combination of Globelink and Photoguard.

Pingback:Long Term Travel Health Insurance Uk – Information

[…] Long Term Travel Insurance Guide | How to Find the Best … – We need to be covered in case anything goes wrong on our travel adventure, but what type of long term travel insurance do we need? Here’s how we found the best … […]

Dan

Do you still recommend the same back pack insurers or do you now use different companies? We are looking for 12-15 months cover, Australia, Vietnam etc. with possibly one or two return trips to the UK.

Amy

Hi Dan, no, we tend to use different insurers now including Explorer, Admiral and now OUL, whichever is best for our trip. For your trip, because you’re doing return trips to the UK, you may need separate travel insurance policies for each time you leave as some insurers consider returning to the UK the end of your policy, so check the small print. I think the best policy to be honest is with World Nomads, as they do year-long multi-trip policies and specialise in offering insurance for long-term travellers. We used them for our recent trek in Nepal, they have a great reputation: http://ourbigfattraveladventure.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=158b627c5beded4ba4196ead3&id=bdb95ab4f3&e=e1e66f2d33

Sean O

“Trip means any holiday, business or pleasure trip or journey made by you within the area of travel shown in the schedule which begins and ends in your home area or place of business during the period of insurance, but excluding one way trips or journey other than travellers from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand – returning home after living in the United Kingdom.”

Post A Comment

About Us

We’re Amy and Andrew, a British couple currently in the midst of our greatest adventure. In March 2013 we quit our jobs, left our home in London and said goodbye to everyone we know to travel the world indefinitely. Read more…